Prepare for Retail Selling Season with On-demand Contact Center Services

Whether your business is focused on online or brick-and-mortar sales, preparing for the year’s various retail selling seasons is no doubt an important part of your strategy. And, like many businesses, you may sometimes find yourself struggling with preparing your customer communications for all of those seasons.

Exacerbating this challenge is the fact that retail selling seasons are by no means static or predictable. Sure, the upcoming Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales combo is a pretty big deal for almost every retailer in North America. But it’s far less easy to predict how busy you’ll be during, say, the President’s Day Weekend or the post-Christmas returns season.

How can you be sure that you’ll have enough customer care agents standing by at every point during the fluctuating retail selling season? Particularly if you’re a modest-sized retailer without the resources of a corporate-level contact center, employing enough reps to ensure seamless customer care can not only be a logistical nightmare, but prohibitively expensive, to boot.

And simply having enough agents doesn’t necessarily meet this challenge. To ensure that you’re earning the customer loyalty you need for long-term success in a competitive consumer market, each and every agent you use must be highly skilled and thoroughly knowledgeable about your business and industry. Part-time temps who join your team for just a few weeks simply won’t cut it.

Even if you’re able to find and employ enough top-quality agents to meet demand during every peak in the retail selling season, keeping them on-staff during the seasonal lulls isn’t efficient. Not only is it expensive, but it’s a poor formula for employee satisfaction. Quality agents aren’t likely to feel fulfilled during times when they have little to do, and it’s hard to blame them for seeking other opportunities.

It’s no small challenge, then, to keep your customer care team fully staffed with top-quality agents during each phase of the retail selling season. Fortunately, there’s an efficient way to meet this challenge: Partnering with an on-demand contact center service who can provide all the high-quality agents you need, when you need them — at no additional cost to you.

How On-demand Contact Center Services Can Help You Manage Retail Selling Seasons

When you partner with on demand contact center service provider, you get a network of dedicated professionals that can scale up or down.
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When you partner with an on-demand contact center service provider like Working Solutions, you get access to a nationwide network of hundreds of thousands of agents. And these aren’t just part-time temps, but highly skilled, fully trained experts. They’re knowledgeable about the finer points of customer care and up to date on the talking points of your industry and specific business.

Even better, this is a flexible staff of dedicated professionals that can scale up or down at a moment’s notice to meet your unique needs. Whether you experience fluctuation due to predictable retail selling seasons, or a less-predictable issue like a severe weather event or unexpected customer demand, on-demand contact center services can help ensure you always have enough agents on-hand.

And because they’re based throughout North America, our agents are culturally in tune with your customers. The rise of the remote workforce has made the need to use offshore customer service (and deal with the customer dissatisfaction that can sometimes cause) a thing of the past. Even better, these agents are also experts in sales and skilled in helping you meet cross-selling and up-selling goals.

Pro Tips: How to Increase Close Rates by 30% and Extend Add-On Sales by 20% with On-Demand Agents

And if you choose to keep your own core of on-staff contact center agents, on-demand agents can still help ensure that you’re able to scale up or down as needed. By smoothly accommodating planned absences like staff vacation or unplanned absences due to sickness or unexpected turnover, it’s also a great way to augment your scheduling strategy.

Pro Tips: How to Scale up Operations 300% or More with 110,000+ On-Demand Agents

Case Studies: How On-demand Contact Center Services Can Help You Meet Your Goals

Learn about a couple real-world examples of how our flexible and scalable on-demand contact center solutions helped businesses.
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But don’t just take our word for it. Here are a couple real-world examples of how our flexible and scalable on-demand contact center solutions helped businesses scale up to meet new levels of customer demand.

Contact Center Case Study #1: Fast Upward Flexing to Meet Ambitious New Goals

A Fortune 100 tech company was seeking to maximize sales with a new fourth-quarter marketing campaign. Its call center staff, however, was maxed out, and not up to the task of this ambitious new goal. In three weeks, Working Solutions was able to deploy 200 top-quality agents with the consumer sales experience necessary to launch a successful campaign.

Contact Center Case Study #2: Scaling Up to Meet New Program Enrollment

When faced with rolling out an ambitious new Medicare-related enrollment program, a Fortune 100 healthcare company realized that the scope of the project — including the need for bilingual specialists who were already well-versed in medical and regulatory details — was outside the abilities of its regular staff. And the clock was ticking.

Enter Working Solutions: We were able to offer 150 bilingual nurses within three weeks of the request. These were specialized professionals who were knowledgeable enough to get to work after only one day of core training. Our partner was able to meet the anticipated spike in customer inquiries while also ensuring patients received the fullest extent of information they needed.

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Nothing frustrates a customer faster than having to deal with a long wait — and few things are as effective in getting them to jump ship to a competitor than interacting with customer service agents who can’t readily answer their questions.

By partnering with an on-demand contact center service provider with a proven track record of helping businesses like your meet the needs not only of a fluctuating retail selling season but also a huge variety of other staffing challenges, you’re helping ensure that your customers stay engaged, satisfied and loyal during the most challenging times of year.